I planned on working on other fills, but this came back to bite me in the ass at 2AM today out of nowhere. My entire plot (which I was agonizing over the three different ways I could see it going, unsure which one I wanted to pick) got side-swiped by a sudden thought, a sudden tangent, a sudden way to draw back in that humor I started to phase out because I got depressed out of nowhere, which happens. So yeah. I now have an ending that works way much better than the angst filled mess that was three different fucked up bits of work. Steve breathed out slowly and looked up at the stars as he sat on the park bench beneath a single tree. He tried to wrap his mind around it, around the fact that Bucky was alive and, apparently, had been stalking him. That Bucky worked for HYDRA, had a mission to kill Nick Fury. That Bucky protected him, took lives for him, shielded him, threatened for him, was hurt, tortured, and remembered because of him. Steve tried to take it in, and failed.
“It’s not like I had a choice, you know?”
Steve closed his eyes, clasped his hands between his knees. He said, “I know,” back.
The Soldier swallowed. “Голубка….” Bucky breathed out a slow, measured breath. “Natasha has a plan.”
They’d been talking for hours. Steve still couldn’t process half of the things Bucky had told him, the Soldier had told him, often reiterated in cold, clinical precision of a mission report. Steve clenched his teeth, tried to push down that thought that practically everyone had known well before he found out the truth. He tried to push down that Bucky wasn’t even going to tell him if he hadn’t made that slip, if Steve hadn’t been one observant son of a bitch.
“She would,” Steve said. Steve didn’t know Natasha as well as Bucky, and he doubted he would ever know her in quite the same way as Bucky considering everything, but Steve knew that the Black Widow rarely did anything without a plan or three in the mix.
“It’s not going to work,” the Soldier said, his words practically monotone. Steve was starting to recognize the shift between pure Bucky and the Soldier which happened with glaring frequency, as if the mind of the man couldn’t make up who he was at any given moment, couldn’t parse things properly. Steve doubted Bucky would ever regain the ability to be wholly one or the other. Maybe, if they could keep him from returning to HYDRA, he’d be able to find a middle ground some day.
Steve wanted to be there, to work with him, to make sure that Bucky could at the very least be able to be a person again. He wanted to see the man come out of this at least in tact if nothing else. It’d be more than Steve could have ever hoped for when Bucky fell from the train, although Steve wasn’t sure if everything that had happened was better than the thought of Bucky dying that day.
“She doesn’t know HYDRA like we do,” Steve murmured in agreement.
Bucky licked his lips, the Soldier reported. “HYDRA within SHIELD buried half of the trigger phrases that are hidden within her mind like a minefield. The decision to reclaim Subject: Black Widow in the resulting chaos from Project Insight would be tactically ideal. Her ability to blend in as a human counteracts my inability to be so.”
“You are human,” Steve said, his words like the force of a sledgehammer enough to make Bucky stutter. Steve glanced to him, eyes almost feverish, and Bucky could believe that Steve’s words were true.
“I...don’t know human interaction very well,” Bucky mumbled. “Not. Anymore.”
Steve clenched his fists, but nodded. “I know, Buck. We’ll figure it out. We’ll...we’ll help you get there again.”
Bucky hissed a breath through his teeth. “They have words they can use on me, too, Голубка. There is no escaping that.”
“You’ve broken programming,” Steve pointed out. “You’ve been breaking it, and from what you’ve told me, far, far quicker than any time you’ve broken through before.”
Months, compared to years, and all it had taken was a man in red, white and blue. Bucky’s lips curled up, almost dangerous in the smirk that threatened to overtake his face. For a moment, a brief, inescapable moment, he felt like they could get through this. That with Steve he could finally defy HYDRA. He could finally keep the things he desired, that he wanted.
“You are,” Bucky halted, the Soldier murmured, “Голубка. Special. Known?”
Steve nodded. He reached out a hand and threaded his fingers with Bucky’s. The Soldier glanced down at them, and then at Steve who stared at him with an expression the Soldier wasn’t quite sure how to read. Steve smiled. “Yeah. You know me, Buck. You’ve always known me.”
“Mine?” the Soldier questioned. He bit his lip.
“Always yours,” Steve said back. “Now, tell me what you have in mind. We have to get our plan straightened out and in a row before he go in guns-a-blazing.”
Bucky blinked. “Taking on HYDRA by ourselves? Why is that familiar?”
Steve grinned. “Because we’ve done this before, although technically it was just me breaking out a hundred or so guys against a base full of enemy men behind enemy lines.”
Bucky stared at him. Really, really, stared at him like he was completely insane, like he had a death wish. Somehow that didn’t feel far off the mark, really. This man, this impossible man who stuck in his mind like a shining, bright light, this foolish, stupid, idiotic punk had really done something like that once. He vaguely remembered, thought he remembered, something about doing it for him except that seemed egotistical and statistically impossible even though this, all of this now, the plans and the thought of taking on HYDRA with just the two of them, was for him.
For the first time Bucky and the Soldier both felt, truly felt, like it could be possible. That he could be free.
They spent the rest of the night, until the sun began to peek up over the horizon, discussing their plan of attack on the park bench. Steve didn’t let go of his hand. Steve hauled Natasha out of the wreckage, lips pressed together. He’d expected something like this the minute he heard that voice speaking, cold, clinical, their names, their date of birth, their alias. He knew that voice. He knew what it meant. Steve could barely contain his fury, it boiled beneath his skin, the temper he’d always had deep down that he kept on a tight leash underneath the saintly, smiling face.
Steve hauled Natasha up out of the wreckage, pushing aside the slab of concrete with lips pressed thin as Natasha wheezed. He asked, “Can you move?”
“I’m good,” Natasha coughed out. “I’m good.”
“Then we should go,” Steve said, catching sight of the lights in the distance. “We’ve got company.”
Natasha nodded and quickly the two of them scrambled through the wreck of Camp Lehigh and into the surrounding forest. They ran for what felt like hours upon hours, darting through trees, trying to avoid what they knew to be HYDRA, had to be HYDRA, sent to confirm that they were dead. Natasha tried not to think about what Lehigh meant in the scheme of things. What Lehigh would do to Steve in particular, even, because that was a can of fish that, for the moment, did not bode well.
About a mile and a half they stumbled across what was potentially a farm. Steve ducked into a barn, a honest to god barn because Natasha could hear horses and pigs and what sounded like sheep. Natasha kept a look out outside, and after a moment Steve returned.
“There’s a truck about forty yards over and what looks like a road,” he said, brushing straw off of his pants.
“HYDRA is five minutes out,” Natasha nodded towards the forest. They could catch the lights dancing above the trees. “They’ll sweep by this place. We have to move.”
“Let’s go, then,” Steve said, and they dashed for the truck. Forty yards was nothing to cover for two enhanced people. It took seconds to get from the barn to the truck, which sat at the edge of the road almost conveniently. Natasha couldn’t see anything immediately wrong with it, but she doubted it was left there, what looked like far enough away from any sort of established building, by chance.
Steve quickly smashed the drivers side window, unlocked the door, and ducked down. He fiddled around, Natasha couldn’t quite see what he was doing, but she didn’t care. They had precious little time, and she focused more or slipping into the passengers side and looked for keys or a sign of why the truck was abandoned in the first place. The engine started, and for a moment she jolted, surprised, as Steve slipped into the seat and pulled the door shut behind him.
“You know how to hotwire a car?” Natasha said.
Steve laughed as he shifted the truck into drive and pressed down on the gas pedal. The engine coughed, and Natasha could see why it’d been abandoned now. The whole thing sounded sickly and probably wouldn’t get them far, but it’d get them far enough.
“You learn things while in the middle of a war you’d never learn otherwise,” he said.
Natasha blinked, and then looked at Steve with slanted eyes. “I can’t quite see it,” she said after a minute.
Steve shot her a smile that was just Steve, it was brilliant and so sweet that Natasha really couldn’t see it. She couldn’t see Steve being anything but the upstanding citizen and, for a moment, that terrified her. She knew he’d been in war, did horrible things, fought, killed, and probably any number of actions that were morally questionable because that was what war did to a person, but she couldn’t see it. She couldn’t see the man who’d knock a guy unconscious over killing him do anything remotely like what men did in war, and it terrified her.
“I left a hundred in a drawer the barn,” Steve said. “As compensation.”
Natasha blinked again, and felt her world tilt back into the realm of normal. That she could see. That felt like the Steve Rogers who would smack a guy around, maybe break a bone or two, but ultimately leave the target alive over killing them.
She shook her head, smiled, and said, “You are a strange one, Rogers.” They took the truck into the first gas station they reached, and then ditched it for another car that Steve quickly hotwired. This car wasn’t keening and dying as it sputtered about, and they drove that back to DC. The trip took up the rest of the night, and left them in the early hours of dawn. They dropped the car in downtown and made their way to Sam’s on foot. Natasha and Steve discussed on the route back where they could go, knowing they were most likely going to be tracked from the multitude of visual information the city provided, and decided upon Sam since he had already been debriefed and pulled into Fury’s ‘seek out HYDRA’ plot.
At Sam’s they washed up, changed clothes, and Natasha tried to check in with Nick and Maria on a burner phone she had for this very reason. They got the news when Sam served up breakfast. Natasha paled quite suddenly as she listened to a message, a look Steve had seen on her only once before, when Clint attacked the Hellicarrier while under Loki’s spell.
Steve closed his eyes. “He’s always been a crackshot,” he said weakly.
“I thought he could break the programming, give Nick a chance,” Natasha muttered. “I didn’t….” Steve reached over, grasped her hand, but he didn’t do anything else. Natasha wouldn’t appreciate anything else. She breathed out, hissed between her teeth.
“I’m sorry for your loss,” Sam said. “He seemed like a good man.”
“He was,” Natasha said.
“I know this might seem like an ass question,” Sam continued, grimacing, “but what does this mean for the plan? The guy was an integral part of it, right?”
Steve closed his eyes, breathed out, and slipped into the mindset of leader, commander. He had to make the tough decisions, and while the loss of Nick wasn’t something they’d banked on, they had to continue onward. They couldn’t stop now.
“We go through with it,” Steve said sharply. Natasha closed her eyes, nodded. She sucked in a breath, compartmentalized everything down. She was good at this.
“We grieve later,” Natasha’s voice was steel. “We finish the mission.”
Fill: Голубка [My Dove] {7A}
Steve breathed out slowly and looked up at the stars as he sat on the park bench beneath a single tree. He tried to wrap his mind around it, around the fact that Bucky was alive and, apparently, had been stalking him. That Bucky worked for HYDRA, had a mission to kill Nick Fury. That Bucky protected him, took lives for him, shielded him, threatened for him, was hurt, tortured, and remembered because of him. Steve tried to take it in, and failed.
“It’s not like I had a choice, you know?”
Steve closed his eyes, clasped his hands between his knees. He said, “I know,” back.
The Soldier swallowed. “Голубка….” Bucky breathed out a slow, measured breath. “Natasha has a plan.”
They’d been talking for hours. Steve still couldn’t process half of the things Bucky had told him, the Soldier had told him, often reiterated in cold, clinical precision of a mission report. Steve clenched his teeth, tried to push down that thought that practically everyone had known well before he found out the truth. He tried to push down that Bucky wasn’t even going to tell him if he hadn’t made that slip, if Steve hadn’t been one observant son of a bitch.
“She would,” Steve said. Steve didn’t know Natasha as well as Bucky, and he doubted he would ever know her in quite the same way as Bucky considering everything, but Steve knew that the Black Widow rarely did anything without a plan or three in the mix.
“It’s not going to work,” the Soldier said, his words practically monotone. Steve was starting to recognize the shift between pure Bucky and the Soldier which happened with glaring frequency, as if the mind of the man couldn’t make up who he was at any given moment, couldn’t parse things properly. Steve doubted Bucky would ever regain the ability to be wholly one or the other. Maybe, if they could keep him from returning to HYDRA, he’d be able to find a middle ground some day.
Steve wanted to be there, to work with him, to make sure that Bucky could at the very least be able to be a person again. He wanted to see the man come out of this at least in tact if nothing else. It’d be more than Steve could have ever hoped for when Bucky fell from the train, although Steve wasn’t sure if everything that had happened was better than the thought of Bucky dying that day.
“She doesn’t know HYDRA like we do,” Steve murmured in agreement.
Bucky licked his lips, the Soldier reported. “HYDRA within SHIELD buried half of the trigger phrases that are hidden within her mind like a minefield. The decision to reclaim Subject: Black Widow in the resulting chaos from Project Insight would be tactically ideal. Her ability to blend in as a human counteracts my inability to be so.”
“You are human,” Steve said, his words like the force of a sledgehammer enough to make Bucky stutter. Steve glanced to him, eyes almost feverish, and Bucky could believe that Steve’s words were true.
“I...don’t know human interaction very well,” Bucky mumbled. “Not. Anymore.”
Steve clenched his fists, but nodded. “I know, Buck. We’ll figure it out. We’ll...we’ll help you get there again.”
Bucky hissed a breath through his teeth. “They have words they can use on me, too, Голубка. There is no escaping that.”
“You’ve broken programming,” Steve pointed out. “You’ve been breaking it, and from what you’ve told me, far, far quicker than any time you’ve broken through before.”
Months, compared to years, and all it had taken was a man in red, white and blue. Bucky’s lips curled up, almost dangerous in the smirk that threatened to overtake his face. For a moment, a brief, inescapable moment, he felt like they could get through this. That with Steve he could finally defy HYDRA. He could finally keep the things he desired, that he wanted.
“You are,” Bucky halted, the Soldier murmured, “Голубка. Special. Known?”
Steve nodded. He reached out a hand and threaded his fingers with Bucky’s. The Soldier glanced down at them, and then at Steve who stared at him with an expression the Soldier wasn’t quite sure how to read. Steve smiled. “Yeah. You know me, Buck. You’ve always known me.”
“Mine?” the Soldier questioned. He bit his lip.
“Always yours,” Steve said back. “Now, tell me what you have in mind. We have to get our plan straightened out and in a row before he go in guns-a-blazing.”
Bucky blinked. “Taking on HYDRA by ourselves? Why is that familiar?”
Steve grinned. “Because we’ve done this before, although technically it was just me breaking out a hundred or so guys against a base full of enemy men behind enemy lines.”
Bucky stared at him. Really, really, stared at him like he was completely insane, like he had a death wish. Somehow that didn’t feel far off the mark, really. This man, this impossible man who stuck in his mind like a shining, bright light, this foolish, stupid, idiotic punk had really done something like that once. He vaguely remembered, thought he remembered, something about doing it for him except that seemed egotistical and statistically impossible even though this, all of this now, the plans and the thought of taking on HYDRA with just the two of them, was for him.
For the first time Bucky and the Soldier both felt, truly felt, like it could be possible. That he could be free.
They spent the rest of the night, until the sun began to peek up over the horizon, discussing their plan of attack on the park bench. Steve didn’t let go of his hand.
Steve hauled Natasha out of the wreckage, lips pressed together. He’d expected something like this the minute he heard that voice speaking, cold, clinical, their names, their date of birth, their alias. He knew that voice. He knew what it meant. Steve could barely contain his fury, it boiled beneath his skin, the temper he’d always had deep down that he kept on a tight leash underneath the saintly, smiling face.
Steve hauled Natasha up out of the wreckage, pushing aside the slab of concrete with lips pressed thin as Natasha wheezed. He asked, “Can you move?”
“I’m good,” Natasha coughed out. “I’m good.”
“Then we should go,” Steve said, catching sight of the lights in the distance. “We’ve got company.”
Natasha nodded and quickly the two of them scrambled through the wreck of Camp Lehigh and into the surrounding forest. They ran for what felt like hours upon hours, darting through trees, trying to avoid what they knew to be HYDRA, had to be HYDRA, sent to confirm that they were dead. Natasha tried not to think about what Lehigh meant in the scheme of things. What Lehigh would do to Steve in particular, even, because that was a can of fish that, for the moment, did not bode well.
About a mile and a half they stumbled across what was potentially a farm. Steve ducked into a barn, a honest to god barn because Natasha could hear horses and pigs and what sounded like sheep. Natasha kept a look out outside, and after a moment Steve returned.
“There’s a truck about forty yards over and what looks like a road,” he said, brushing straw off of his pants.
“HYDRA is five minutes out,” Natasha nodded towards the forest. They could catch the lights dancing above the trees. “They’ll sweep by this place. We have to move.”
“Let’s go, then,” Steve said, and they dashed for the truck. Forty yards was nothing to cover for two enhanced people. It took seconds to get from the barn to the truck, which sat at the edge of the road almost conveniently. Natasha couldn’t see anything immediately wrong with it, but she doubted it was left there, what looked like far enough away from any sort of established building, by chance.
Steve quickly smashed the drivers side window, unlocked the door, and ducked down. He fiddled around, Natasha couldn’t quite see what he was doing, but she didn’t care. They had precious little time, and she focused more or slipping into the passengers side and looked for keys or a sign of why the truck was abandoned in the first place. The engine started, and for a moment she jolted, surprised, as Steve slipped into the seat and pulled the door shut behind him.
“You know how to hotwire a car?” Natasha said.
Steve laughed as he shifted the truck into drive and pressed down on the gas pedal. The engine coughed, and Natasha could see why it’d been abandoned now. The whole thing sounded sickly and probably wouldn’t get them far, but it’d get them far enough.
“You learn things while in the middle of a war you’d never learn otherwise,” he said.
Natasha blinked, and then looked at Steve with slanted eyes. “I can’t quite see it,” she said after a minute.
Steve shot her a smile that was just Steve, it was brilliant and so sweet that Natasha really couldn’t see it. She couldn’t see Steve being anything but the upstanding citizen and, for a moment, that terrified her. She knew he’d been in war, did horrible things, fought, killed, and probably any number of actions that were morally questionable because that was what war did to a person, but she couldn’t see it. She couldn’t see the man who’d knock a guy unconscious over killing him do anything remotely like what men did in war, and it terrified her.
“I left a hundred in a drawer the barn,” Steve said. “As compensation.”
Natasha blinked again, and felt her world tilt back into the realm of normal. That she could see. That felt like the Steve Rogers who would smack a guy around, maybe break a bone or two, but ultimately leave the target alive over killing them.
She shook her head, smiled, and said, “You are a strange one, Rogers.”
They took the truck into the first gas station they reached, and then ditched it for another car that Steve quickly hotwired. This car wasn’t keening and dying as it sputtered about, and they drove that back to DC. The trip took up the rest of the night, and left them in the early hours of dawn. They dropped the car in downtown and made their way to Sam’s on foot. Natasha and Steve discussed on the route back where they could go, knowing they were most likely going to be tracked from the multitude of visual information the city provided, and decided upon Sam since he had already been debriefed and pulled into Fury’s ‘seek out HYDRA’ plot.
At Sam’s they washed up, changed clothes, and Natasha tried to check in with Nick and Maria on a burner phone she had for this very reason. They got the news when Sam served up breakfast. Natasha paled quite suddenly as she listened to a message, a look Steve had seen on her only once before, when Clint attacked the Hellicarrier while under Loki’s spell.
“Natasha?” he questioned.
“Nick’s dead,” Natasha said, voice faint. “He...he actually succeeded.”
Steve closed his eyes. “He’s always been a crackshot,” he said weakly.
“I thought he could break the programming, give Nick a chance,” Natasha muttered. “I didn’t….” Steve reached over, grasped her hand, but he didn’t do anything else. Natasha wouldn’t appreciate anything else. She breathed out, hissed between her teeth.
“I’m sorry for your loss,” Sam said. “He seemed like a good man.”
“He was,” Natasha said.
“I know this might seem like an ass question,” Sam continued, grimacing, “but what does this mean for the plan? The guy was an integral part of it, right?”
Steve closed his eyes, breathed out, and slipped into the mindset of leader, commander. He had to make the tough decisions, and while the loss of Nick wasn’t something they’d banked on, they had to continue onward. They couldn’t stop now.
“We go through with it,” Steve said sharply. Natasha closed her eyes, nodded. She sucked in a breath, compartmentalized everything down. She was good at this.
“We grieve later,” Natasha’s voice was steel. “We finish the mission.”